A Resource for Donors
Where to give away your stuff in the DC area
Where to give away your stuff in the San Francisco Bay Area
Where to give away your stuff in Southern California
In response to most major disasters, local funders and organizations often create funds to efficiently collect and distribute donor contributions. For individual donors, finding and supporting these local funds is an effective way to respond to a disaster.
The covid-19 disaster has impacted almost every community, both in the U.S. and around the world. Here is a list of nearly 900 local funds in the U.S. that have been set up to help respond to the impact of the pandemic in their communities.
Here is a summary of the funds in the DC area set up to respond to the pandemic.
Here are how many individual charities are responding to the pandemic.
Here what many international charities are doing to respond to covid-19 in other countries.
For more than 30 years, Charitable Choices' goal has been to help donors make good giving decisions and to help charities, especially smaller charities without large marketing budgets, communicate their work to donors.
For donors, we provide easy-to-use information that tells you what charities do and answers some of your questions. Why should I support your charity's work? How can I be sure you won't waste my donation? How does your work differ from that of other charities doing similar work? How will you make a difference over time?
You can find charities answers to these questions by clicking on All Charities A to Z or any of the other links in the left column.
We also provide easy-to-understand information about the process of making donations. How do you decide? Should you support charities providing direct services to people in need (like food for the hungry) or support charities that try to change the underlying reasons that people go hungry? How important is a charity's overhead percentage? What's the best way to give?
We answer questions like these and many more and try to keep donors aware of interesting and useful information about giving.
How to decide which charities to support
How to decide: Don't assume that efficiency equals effectiveness
How to read a charity tax form
How much is given? By Whom? To What?
Should you give through the Combined Federal Campaign?
One question we get constantly is where can I give away...furniture, toys, clothes, cars...the list is long. In response we've put together a list of charities that receives "in-kind donations" in three cities so far:
One of the most noteworthy developments in the CFC during the past few years has been the rise of the Wounded Warrior Project, which has come from nowhere to raise the third most in the 2013 CFC -- $4.6 million.